by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
It definitely seems as though we’re in a twilight of the gods moment when it comes to technology and, specifically, social media. We’re careening towards a brave new world of AI — even, maybe, a Petite Singularity — and, as such, all our notions about the nature and importance of social media will seem rather quaint soon enough.
And, yet, I continue to feel a bit of frustration over how bad social media is these days. I have a very specific vision of how one might bring the fun back to social media. But, alas, I’m flat broke, can’t code and have no desire to learn. So, in that respect, all my talk about this matter is just very prolonged bout of mental masturbation.
That’s why I’ve found a lot of joy writing a novel — writing a novel is something I can actually do using the resources I have at hand.
But back to my social media vision.
The key thing is my little social media daydream addresses the sweetspot of the using, say, Twitter. What I would do is actually have a paid editorial staff that would post to the service so as to make it really useful.
As I’ve mentioned many times before, the service’s UX would be inspired by the old Usenet Newsgroups. Each user would have the ability to create an endless number of Groups that they would Post into. This idea solves a lot of problems when it comes to managing not only different elements of your life, but also grouping subjects together in a meaningful way.
Of course, by definition, having Groups causes an inherent design flaw that would have to be overcome. I think one solution to this problem is the use of the traditional newsfeed concept. As such, while you would subscribe to a Group, there would be a way to cut through all the Groups and see an excerpt of individual Posts within those groups.
That would be one way to prevent the problems associated with no just Usenet News, but Reddit as well.
Another element of this concept that I like is how within each Group you would have threaded full-page Posts. You could have essentially a whole multimedia Webpage that was threaded inside of a Group. This part of the service opens up all kinds of advertising possibilities.
Anyway, baring something I can’t predict this all just a daydream. It’s too bad. I think people would really enjoy it.
